Museum of the City of New York

It’s the 40th anniversary of the glorious Centre Pompidou, and to celebrate the offices of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers have released a bevy of gorgeous archival images. One includes their riverside inflatable office, which looks like something out of A Clockwork Orange if it were a movie about a fun slumber party I would want to go to. [Dezeen]

Sean Spicer actually retweeted his own profile in The Onion, which labelled his job distributing “Robust and Clearly Articulated Misinformation”. For once, Spicer and the rest of the world see eye-to-eye on reality. [New York Magazine]

Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova will be speaking tonight at JHU. If you’re in Baltimore, go see her. She’s a gem we need now more than ever. [Johns Hopkins University]

Iranian collector Mohammed Afkhami has loaned an impressive slew of contemporary works from his country to Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum for the exhibition “Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians.” That’s the kind of cultural exchange we sadly can’t look forward to in the United States anymore. [artnet News]

Contemporary Art Review has put out a somewhat vague call for works from artists worldwide. [NOT RANDOM ART]

The Thompson Family Foundation has given a staggering $10 million to the Museum of the City of New York to keep the exhibit New York at its Core “open to the public from now until Trump starts a nuclear war.” [Observer]

Anish Kapoor has joined the anti-Trump movement with a self-portrait: “I Like America and America Doesn’t Like Me.” It’s a play on Joseph Beuys’ 1974 performance “I Like America and America Likes Me,” which appropriately began at Kennedy Airport. [Blouin Artinfo]

Holy crap! The young handyman from cult classic Grey Gardens, Jerry Torre, is an all-grown up artist now. His work is on view at Geary Contemporary until February 3rd. [The Art Newspaper]

What would happen if Trump cut all federal funding for the arts? Realistically, it might not be too much of a dent in the big-city art world, where grants from private organizations and deep-pocketed institutions keep things afloat. Those who would suffer the most would be rural Americans (i.e. Trump voters), who rely largely on government arts funding for basic things like radio stations. I’ve heard what those people listen to on the radio. I say screw em like they would us over a Chris Ofili show. [The New York Times]

Why are the Republicans constantly going after the damn NEA? “Because art is one of the few things that has the power to liberate, to overthrow, to topple, to rebel, to express the forbidden, to cut the tyrants down to size? Perhaps it is a sort of secret language, only for the ‘elite’: But in this case, the elite are not the wealthy. These elite are those with open, rich and thoughtful minds.” [Salon]

Activists are already calling for another general strike, this one on February 17th, the day before Presidents Day. Hell yeah! Let’s make this a monthly thing. [Mic]

The world needed this: Every mention of pie and coffee in TWIN PEAKS. [Slacktory]

Biggest building opens in Chengdu, China, large enough to house 20 Sydney opera houses under its roof. [The Guardian]

Edward Winkleman interviews arts journalist and blogger Tyler Green about journalism. Green thinks the old model of journalism is gone and that we should all stop bitching about it. [Edward Winkleman]

Here’s a backwards article: Artists get more money from kickstarter than from the N.E.A., and writer Katherine Boyle writes that she isn’t surprised, because private philanthropy outpaces government support. Kickstarter campaigns aren’t philanthropy though, they’re crowdsourced funding used to support the production of products. That’s different than supporting an intangible cultural good. [Washington Post]

Anatoly Iksanov, director of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow, was fired after a man threw acid in the art director’s face. A dancer said “that the theater has plunged into crime and violence under Iksanov’s watch.” [Huffington Post]

Well, this is too bad. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago has cut short a ten-week private home tour of London-based artist Amalia Pica’s small granite sculpture on July 1. It’s assumed the piece was damaged in transit, but no details have been given. [Chicago Magazine]

The Do It interactive show at Manchester Gallery features work from Louise Bourgeois, Ai Wei Wei, Gibert & George, and Yoko Ono, among others, that tells you what to do. Most edicts are relatively frivolous, nothing despotic [The Guardian]

Making Room opens at the Museum of the City of New York, offering design solutions to cramped New York apartment living. [Hyperallergic]

A record rainfall has left Toronto streets flooded. Their subway, which was shut down yesterday due to the rain, has started running again, but the city has yet to fully recover with many roads still blocked. Porter airlines was forced to cancel all flights yesterday after the airport lost power. [Globe and Mail]

This week, the Museum of the City of New York announced they will pull out of their now 27-month (originally 18-month) project to put the South Street Seaport Museum back on its feet. Under the City Museum’s leadership, the Seaport Museum was finally emerging from its decades-long downswing, but that was before Superstorm Sandy hit in last October. Now, with $22 million worth of damage, the museum needs to find a financial backer or this historic Manhattan institution will fall into the hands of the New York attorney general.

2011 wasn't a great year for either the Seaport Museum or the American Folk Art Museum. The two museums have been in dire financial straits for the past several years, struggling to keep rising operating costs down while bleeding admissions and memberships. We took a deeper look at their finances to figure out what these museums’ prospects look like.